Welcome to Episode 37 of the Birthworker Podcast. Today, we are talking about niching down, and I assume that a lot of you, if you're listening, you've heard this term before, niching down. But the reason that I really wanted to talk about it today and to dedicate a whole episode to it is because people actually ask me this all the time. I hear it in my communities all the time and really, just people on Instagram DM me and they ask me, "Do you think I should niche down even more? Do you think I am too broad? Do you think I'm trying to serve too many people?" And to be honest, most of the time, the answer is yes, I think you are trying to serve way too many people.

And I actually get this question, like I said, a lot, but not so much from the people in my communities because this is something foundational that I teach inside my programs, especially the Birthworker Academy where I teach new doulas. It is my A to Z, comprehensive doula training program. And to be honest, actually, a lot of our students come to us after taking another doula training program and leaving that program feeling totally unsatisfied and they come to us and we help them turn that right around.

And so, let's jump into niching. The questions we are going to answer today are how do I choose my niche? Do I need to niche down? Why do I need to niche down? And Kyleigh, why do I have to choose a specific niche if I can really help everyone because I want to help everyone? And so, let's dive into that and more in today's episode.

Hey, there, birth nerd. You're listening to the Birthworker podcast. My name is Kyleigh Banks and I am totally obsessed with birth and equally obsessed with business. And this is the show where I help women turn their passion for birth into a sustainable, profitable, and most importantly, impactful career. All right, let's get into it.

Now, I have to be honest, there comes a time for almost every new entrepreneur. Maybe you've been a doula for a while and you're finally seeing yourself as an entrepreneur and putting the time into your business that your business really deserves. Or maybe you're totally new to this whole doula thing or birth work thing. But I promise you, there comes a time where 99% of entrepreneurs feel like they're stuck. They feel like their offer isn't selling, their audience online isn't growing. And so what got them to that place, right? And what can we do to actually avoid ever getting to that place as an entrepreneur?

And so what I think is if someone gets to that place where their offer isn't selling, their audience isn't growing, and they feel stuck, I think that they've spent too much time and too much of their emphasis on what do I want to sell? What am I going to be known for? What's important to me? What do I feel like teaching? And yes, you should be asking those questions, but not stopping there, not without also asking the question, what does my community actually want? What do the people in my life actually want from me? What do my followers want from me?

And so, this really actually leads us down to this conversation about niching down, about choosing who your audience is because I think that is actually the very first step to creating an irresistible offer. And an irresistible offer can be anything from a doula package to an online birth course to a workshop that you're hosting, anything. It could be a freebie too. It doesn't even have to be something you're paying for. But the very first step to creating that irresistible offer, that irresistible freebie is really niching down.

And so when people come to me and they say they aren't getting clients, they aren't growing their following, they can't grow their email list, no one's clicking to their website, this is the thing that I look at first. And I want to ask them, "Have you really started to identify your superpower? Have you started to identify what makes you different than the other thousands of doulas and thousands of birth workers on Instagram, for instance? And have you gotten very clear and very, very specific about who it is that you actually serve?" And in the business world, this is called niching down. And so if you decide to make an offer for a niche that doesn't already have an audience of people that are ready to buy it, that's going to lead to a really bad offer, right? And for instance, what would that look like?

That would look like you are a doula that serves free birth moms, but only after they've had seven cesareans in the hospital. It's like, "Okay, well, there's not an audience there ready to buy your stuff, ready to pay you, ready to hire you as a doula," right? Or sometimes, people don't even choose a niche at all, right? Sometimes, people are like, "I serve everybody." But then, what happens is you end up creating an offer that's way too general and way too broad. The whole purpose is that you don't want to serve everyone. If you're trying to serve everyone, you're bland, you're boring. And I can guarantee you're not going to be perceived as the expert in any one of those topics, right? You're going to be kind of okay at a lot of things, but not really great at one specific thing.

And so niching down is the thing that is going to cut through the noise. It's going to get you the attention. When we're general and when we're broad, we're confusing. Our messaging is confusing. We are all over the place. We are that person, like I said, who's maybe kind of good at a lot of things, but not really an expert in any one thing. But when you niche down, that's when you become really specific. And that specificity, that is what creates three different things. It creates clarity, and clarity is so important, creates clarity on who you are, what you do, who you serve. But it also creates connection. And this connection is like, "Okay, this doula knows what she's talking about. This doula knows what I want, and this doula knows how to serve me, my very specific situation. We're on the same page," right? So clarity, connection.

And then the third thing is that it creates this specialization. And so I love this example and the example is if you had a heart condition, and I'm pretty sure I've said this on a podcast in the last couple months, but if you had a heart condition, would you rather go to the general practitioner, the family doctor, or would you rather go to literally the country's best heart surgeon? It's like a no-brainer, right? You go to the specialist. You go to the person who has niched down so incredibly specific to serve your specific pain point, right? So if me, Kyleigh, the pregnancy, birth, postpartum, loss, abortion, bereavement doula that serves everyone at every stage of motherhood for every reason, if that's how I create my business, I'm going to actually end up serving nobody because all of my potential clients, they look right over me and they go to the specialists.

If someone is experiencing a miscarriage, they're going to the miscarriage doula. If someone is planning to have a free birth at home, they're going to go to the free birth doula. They're not going to that general doula who serves everyone in pregnancy, birth, postpartum, loss, all of it, right? They go to the specialist because when you're a specialist and when you're really good at that one thing, you are the expert. And I know a lot of birth workers, especially new birth workers, get caught up on this thing where it's like, "Well, I'm not an expert because I don't know everything there is to know about birth." And really, what it comes down to is like, "Well, yeah, that's not the point. The point isn't to know every little thing about birth." But what if you knew everything about that one thing? What if you knew everything about miscarriage? What if you knew everything about free birth or about vaginal birth after cesarean, right? Can you see where I'm going with this?

So when someone comes to me and they're having issues getting people on their email list, selling their offers, this is where I start because a lot of people, a lot of doulas either don't know their niche. They have that niche with no audience. That was like your niche is the free birth mom after seven cesareans. Okay, there's nobody in that audience or they've chosen a niche that is just not niched down enough. And so what I really want to do is I want to introduce this really important piece of this entrepreneur pyramid and it's really at the base, at the foundation that holds up everything else and that is getting very clear and very specific on who you're actually serving.

So, instead of being the pregnancy, birth, and postpartum doula that serves everyone at every stage of motherhood for every reason, what I want you to actually do is I want you to narrow it down a couple levels. And so I want you to try and envision this with me. So let's say the widest niche possible is the pregnancy, birth, and postpartum and bereavement doula who serves everyone at every stage of motherhood for every reason, right? So let's narrow it down one level. What would that look like to create an offer that instead of being for pregnancy, birth, postpartum, loss, abortion, whatever, let's say it's just for pregnancy, not for all of the other stages, right? So that would be narrowing it down one level.

But let's not stop there. Let's go down again. So let's narrow it down another level. And so that would be like this offer is for pregnancy for somebody planning a vaginal birth after cesarean. That's one example. Or this offer is for pregnancy for someone who's having a twin pregnancy. That's narrowing it down one more level, right?

So again, the widest niche is I serve all moms all the time. Let's narrow it down at least two levels from there, two, three, four levels. Because when you're trying to serve everyone, you end up serving no one because people overlook you. And this one thing is so huge. And so I just have to say that I can hear you and if it's not you, it's someone else listening to this podcast. I can hear you saying, "Kyleigh, but niching down limits me. I have so much to offer. I have so many passions. I can help people in so many ways." I just like don't want to put myself into this box.

And here, I hope this is an aha moment for you. And I learned this from James Wedmore. He's a business coach. He taught me that your niche is not putting you in a box. Your niche is putting your offer in a box. And so your niche is not about limiting you. You can have multiple skills. You can help multiple people in many different ways, but you can think of your niche as more for your offer. So every offer that you create has to serve one very specific subset of people. And I want you to create also, essentially, website pages and maybe even as far as going to make freebies and resources for every niche, so essentially, for every offer that you have.

And so this really should be a mind-blowing moment for you. If you've been saying, "I can't niche down because I can serve so many people in so many ways." It's like, "Awesome, good, great, do that. But as you're doing that, I still need you to only ever talk to one person at a time, though. Talk to the one person that has the very specific problem and I want you to talk to them with a very clear and specific message."

And so what does that look like? Let's say, maybe you have a placenta encapsulation package that you offer. That's already very specific, right? You are taking their placenta, you're encapsulating it, maybe doing some placenta art for them. That's very specific. That's an example of a very niched down offer. Does that mean that placenta encapsulation is all that you can ever do? No, of course not. You can have multiple offers. I create new offers all the freaking time, and you can actually look at my business, right? So now, I have three very large and comprehensive programs.

I have Birthworker Academy. That's for people who are new to birthwork. It's for someone who either has never taken a doula training program before or they left their doula training program completely clueless as to what to actually do, how to actually serve moms, how to actually create their business. And so that is one niche that I have. Another niche that I have is a doula who is totally burnt out because all she's doing is creating in-person packages. And what I can do inside the Birthworker membership is teach her how to systemize her social media, how to create an awesome website and really get the online portion of her business rocking and rolling. So creating the freebie, offering the eBooks or the workshops or the mini courses, creating an email list, right? So right there, those two offers, my doula training program, which is the Birthworker Academy and my Birthworker membership, my business membership, that serves different niches.

And now, I just added this third, so my Childbirth Educator Training program. That is for someone who either already is a doula and they already have in-person clients. Now, they just want to add another way to serve those women by creating a childbirth education course. Or it's someone who doesn't actually want to attend births at all, but they want to step into birth work and only create a childbirth education course.

And so my niche is not just birth workers, right? That is the broad overarching group of people I serve. But if I served all birth workers all the time, my business would not be successful. Every offer, every comprehensive offer that I create, I speak to one very specific niche. Does that make sense? When you look at my website and you look at my sales pages, I'm very clear about who my offers are for and very clear about who they're not for, actually. And I do that all through my copywriting and my messaging right there on the sales page.

And so in order to do that effectively, in order for me to have literally hundreds of students in each of those programs, I had to get very clear about my messaging. I needed to figure out who my community is and what they want and what makes me different. And on each of those offers, whenever I talk about each of my programs, I'm talking to that one very specific person and that is my niche. And so when you were trying to figure out what niche you want to serve, what small subset of people you want to serve, I want you to get as clear as possible. And then, I actually want you to see if you can narrow it down or dumb it down just a little bit more. Like how can you actually make this literally as simple as can be?

And so for me, when I started my business four years ago, five years ago, what I landed on was I help moms who are take-no-shit moms prepare for birth, moms who say, "I don't want anybody to tell me what to do. I don't need anybody's help. I can do this myself. I don't want any of your bullshit." Those are the kind of moms that I serve and that I started serving when I created my doula business. And so what happened is all of my messaging reflected that. So I'm sassy. I'm really to the point, but also, I'm playful. I really don't take many things seriously. And so all of that means that my messaging portrays that confidence. And so that's the kind of people that I bring in. That's the kind of people that I attract. And so when you can get this thing right, when you can get your niche right, what you're actually going to do is you're going to actually be turning off a lot of people by the way that you present yourself. But I want you to know that that's actually a really good thing.

Because when there's people out there that say, "Ew, I don't like Kyleigh," what that means is there's also people out there that say, "Wow, I love Kyleigh so much that I will literally participate in anything and everything she creates. I'm going to hire her as my doula. I'm going to join her childbirth education program. And you know what? I love her so much that I'm actually going to become a doula now and I'm going to go take her doula training program and maybe, her childbirth educator training too." And I cannot tell you the amount of people that I've had do that hire me as a doula or as a birth coach and follow me down. And by every single offer that I ever created, it's because I got very clear on my messaging. It's because my community, a lot of the times, says, "Kyleigh is speaking the things that I think to myself that I don't say out loud. And that's what we want."

And so I want to tell you too, when I started, when I really started, when I started from zero, when I just left my doula training that I did, I didn't know any of this. I didn't see myself as a true business owner yet. I didn't start learning any of the business stuff. And I did want to serve everyone, right? I did want to serve everyone. I made posts about baby-led weaning and cloth diapering and pregnancy and abortion and loss and postpartum and feeding and breastfeeding and all of it. But it wasn't until that I actually really started listening to my community and hearing them and really hearing them and understanding what they wanted from me. That is when it clicked. That was the domino that started this entire thing for me. And it got a little bit out of control how fast I grew because I really learned to do this one thing, to really narrow it down. So that is what I want for you too.

And the last thing that I want to leave you with is that one of the most important things you can do as you are starting to choose your niche, niching down, is I want you to be authentic. I don't want you at all to choose your niche based on what you think is going to make money or make other people happy or be easy. None of that. None of it. I want you to ask yourself, "What makes you different than the other doulas out there?" And then, I want you to realize that one of the best answers is that there's literally only one of you. You are what makes you different than the other doulas out there. So tune into that. See what that actually can look like and see how you actually want to play that out when you serve the women in your community.

And, of course, like being authentic is way easier said than done. It's like telling our clients, "You can say no," but actually saying no and knowing that you can say no are two very different things. And so same with this. Like being authentic is way easier said than done, especially when it comes to early entrepreneurship because most people just want their mentors to tell them what to do. They just want to copy other people's websites because they say, "If that person is successful, let me just copy their website, copy their brand, and then it's going to work for me. Let me just copy their emails and their sales page."

But here's what I really believe. I believe that it's not going to click for you. You are not really going to find that success until you're authentic. That is when it starts to fall into place. The more you are your raw self without a filter, the easier it's going to be to find your people, to create a business, to create a movement where you have this community who just wants everything that you're creating. If you want to do that, if you want to create a business like that, you got to be authentic. You got to be yourself without a filter.

And while you're doing all of this, just know that this is a total lifetime journey. Your messaging, your branding, your offers, your brand colors, all of it, it's all ever changing. It's ever growing. And really, it should never be completely static, right? It should never be the same thing for the next 30 years because if it is, that means you're not listening to your community because your community's changing. So it's a really good thing, actually, if you shift, if your niche shifts, if your messaging shifts, if your brand shifts because every time you shift, you're just going to get a little bit clearer on who it is you actually serve, why you serve them, and how you serve them. But the thing is, like all of this, you just got to start somewhere. So start somewhere, choose your niche, and then niche down a couple levels deeper and I'm super excited to see who you actually end up serving.

Thank you so much for tuning in today, and if you are ready to grow your doula business, if you are ready to build your legacy bigger than you ever dreamed possible, DM me over on Instagram. DM me the word "legacy" and let's chat about how I can actually help you get there way faster and with a whole lot less stress. Building a business, especially as a doula, can feel really, really lonely. But I promise you that you do not have to walk that path alone. You can walk it with a mentor by your side and a community supporting you every single step of the way. I cannot wait to chat with you, hear your dreams, and help you get there in 2023.